Billy Brethren

I have a project I need to do, where I send "Announcements" (in the form of Posts) to Members/Patricipants of various forums.

There are @ 200 of these forums and they are exactly the same, so as I envision it, it is a simple matter of generating a list of web-site addresses, doing a few repetitive keystrokes to log in, post the message and log off, and then go to the next web-address.

I took a class in BASIC 20 years ago, and this project seems fairly simple.

Can it be done in HTML ? If not, what is the easiest programming language to use.

Could someone please hold my hand and answer questions until I learn how to write this program ?


Thanks in advance,


Billy Brethren

Pizentios

you could probally use php. however you might run into problems with the security on these forums. Most forums don't let you post from outside of being loged in. unless they have a guest option. After you get around the security of the forums it would be as simple as finding out what the tables etc are used in the db or forums to store the post. But the only way your going to find that out is but ether grabing a copy of the forum software, or asking an admin directly for the info. First option is most viable. As far as the security goes i havn't the foggyest idea on how the forums that your trying to post to work, so i can't really help you with this problem other than what i have just posted.

Are you sure your not just trying to spam 200 forums all at once with a ad or somthing?

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Billy Brethren

Wow. This is the second forum where WHY I want to do this is more relevant that what or how. This must be an indicator of the current "culture" of Programmers, apparantly in reaction to spam & spammers.

I could probably write an entire essay on this subject, but really I came to a technical forum to get technical information.

For the record, the messages I want to send is not "spam" in the sense that it is an advertisment for a product or service in exchange for money. I will not profit once cent in this endeavor, nor will anyone else. I used the phrase "public announcements" in the most political sense. I will be perfectly happy to fully inform any technically informed and helpful person that wants to know while they are helping me to inform myself, but really I can't see how it is anyone's business or why they would even care.

As far as the technical end of the situation, all these "forums" are owned & operated by one company, they all have the exact same format and so I can do all the logging "on" & "off" with one username and one password (mine) and that (and how) I do this is perfectly legitimate. It's simply that it would be a full-time job doing each of these posts one at a time, and I would like to have the ability to send my message to everyone all at once.

I am not so concerned with the security issues, rather I just need help in setting up (what I thing of as) the "For-Next" loop, the data set for the various web-addresses and the completely repetitive keystrokes for logging on & off.

This can't possibly be "rocket science", and the amount of "spam" in the universe is not going to increase one byte by my actions. I think what I want to do is VERY interesting, and would be willing to share with a helpful person.

I appreciate the suggestion for PHP; it is the second time I have heard it. I went to a PHP web-site and perused their "tutorial" and it looked extremely difficult to learn.

HTML can't send keystrokes ? HTML can't read from a data set and run a loop that picks up the NEXT data at each iteration ?

This seems so simple to me. I thought HTML was an actual language that could do things. Is it better described as a protocol ?

Thanks in advance.

Billy Brethren

big_k105

php or perl/cgi is goin to be your best bet for this. HTML is not actually a programming language it is a markup language. which means it is only ment for formatting and what not. so php is goin to be one of the few options you have here as the forums you are trying to post on are probably run in php. so first question i would need to find out is what forum software do all of these forums run. if its custom you will need to find this info out and will probably need to find the source code for the forums to even have a chance of boing able to do this. another thing to look into is creating a bot that can go to each website and then post what you need it to post. this will only work tho if the forums dont have away to stop bots from logging on to a user name. if they dont then it should be just fine. let us know what software they are running i can try my best to guide you thru this
and there is no reason to get upset over when a member askes you why you are doing this they are just trying to get a better idea of the project.

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BlazingWolf

HTML is madeo only for designing your wesbite. You will have to use PHP, or ASP to do want you want to do.

If you look into it more PHP is very simple langauge to learn.

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Pizentios

Why do you think it's like that?? Maybe because people that spam have wreaked it for "ligitimate" operators like you? Paranoia is the best defense against spam, spyware, etc....

Also, if you know anything about how bad spam and spyware have become, you'd understand why i asked the question that i did. I personally wouldn't want to be responible for coding a program that spams a bunch of on-line forums.

Now for your problem.

It's all going to come down to a set of sql statments. However, why out knowing more about the forum software it'll be hard for anyone to design a program to send these statments out to the various websites that you want to connect too.

Another option (and the most simple) would be get permission from the company that owns these forums to connect to the database backend only and skip the webbased crap. It'd be alot easyer just talking to the database. Also then you'd know what to exactly put into your sql staments.

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Ooble

You could write a simple Windows app that uses the PostMessage or SendKeys Windows APIs to type in your username and password, click the Post button, type the info in, post it, and log out.

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bl00dninja

yeah, every time i get drunk and send out technical support emails (questions) to people i always forget about it and wake up the next day with some email explaining that my foul/vulgar language is unnecessary. i hate them.

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kurifu

Just as though, you could probably get around the whole security issue of not being logged in by signing your work with an X.509 certificate, this is a little more complex, but would address most of the security issues related with the project.

gPGP and openSSL have good API you can work with the acheive this if you are interested.

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I know I'm a nub when I don't understand something in the HTML forum!

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